‘81 Shooter Requests Prison Leave to Attend Funeral

Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981, has requested a leave from prison to attend the pontiff’s funeral, saying he is mourning the loss of his “spiritual brother.”

“I must be there,” Agca said Monday through his attorney. “I must attend the funeral.”

The lawyer, Mustafa Demirag, met with Agca in Istanbul’s Kartal prison and said he would seek permission from a prosecutor for his client to travel to Rome.

Demirag acknowledged that it was unlikely the maximum-security inmate would be allowed to attend.

The pope met with Agca in an Italian prison in 1983 and forgave the gunman for the shooting.

“Agca absolutely adores the pope; his death would be an enormous blow,” said Agca’s brother, Adnan, in a recent interview before John Paul died Saturday.

Agca, 48, was extradited to Turkey in 2000 after serving almost 20 years in Italy for his failed attempt on the life of the pope. He is serving out the remaining 9 1/2 years of an earlier conviction for the 1979 killing of a prominent Turkish journalist.

Despite three investigations and two trials, mystery still shrouds the gunman’s attempt to kill the pope.

Agca, an escaped convict at the time of the attack on the pope, initially claimed that he had acted on his own.

He then said Bulgarian and Czechoslovak agents working on behalf of the Soviet Union’s KGB had trained him as a killer in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital. The goal of the plot, he said, was to halt John Paul’s anti-communism crusade, which was gaining ground in the Eastern Bloc, especially in the pope’s homeland of Poland.

In December 1980, Agca traveled to Rome. The following May, he opened fire with a semiautomatic pistol as the pope rode in an open jeep through St. Peter’s Square. One bullet tore through John Paul’s abdomen but missed his vital organs. Another bullet hit his left hand and a third his right arm.

In 1986, at his second trial, Agca said that part of his testimony had been lies. He also claimed to be Jesus Christ. Italian prosecutors failed to prove charges that the Bulgarian secret service had hired him on behalf of the Soviet Union. The pope also said he did not believe that Bulgaria was involved.

Agca now claims his attempted killing of the pope was part of a “divine plan.”

“He believes God used him as an instrument in a grand design that is beyond the comprehension of mortals,” said Adnan, the brother.

“The divine plan has come to its conclusion,” Agca said in a handwritten letter faxed by his attorney to Associated Press.